1. Field of Invention
This invention generally relates to systems and methods for interacting with computer program applications.
2. Description of Related Art
Portable document solutions for Personal Digital Assistant-class (PDA-class) devices from competing vendors rely on remote servers to perform the services. A user interacts with the remote server through a general-purpose browser, which has fill-in fields, action buttons, and so forth. The document creator applications, e-mail software, communication software, and mobile information device-resident browsers installed on many PDA-class devices often come from various suppliers.
A mobile information device (MID) is a handheld device that combines computer applications, telephony and/or remote networking features. A typical mobile information device can function as a cellular phone and/or a personal organizer. A mobile information device may be equipped with a hypertext-markup-language (HTML) or wireless access protocol (WAP) browser and/or e-mail reader.
High value information is frequently inaccessible to users of mobile information devices (MID) because this information is often in a file having a file format that is inaccessible to software installed on the mobile information device or because it is otherwise inaccessible for some other reason. Such files may be in any number of file formats, for example, spreadsheet, word processing, or high-resolution graphical file formats. Software applications, which can interact with the data format of the files to be accessed, are not typically installed on the mobile information device. Therefore, the user of the mobile information device cannot access the information embedded in such files. Instead, these applications may be installed at a remotely-located document access server. A document access server allows a remote user to fax, print, and/or view information stored on, or otherwise accessible to the document access server. In response to a command issued at the mobile information device, the document access server prepares the attachment for viewing, printing and/or faxing, and dispatches the prepared document to a target fax machine, printer, or other appropriate device.